Think Progress reports of yet another case of policing gone wrong in America…

Police were looking for a bank robber when they arrested Charles Belk on Friday night. The profile of the suspect was tall, black, and bald. And so is Belk. They were both wearing green shirts. That’s all the information they had. And that’s all the information they deemed necessary to hold Belk for six hours late Friday night, according to the accounts of Belk and his lawyer.

“It’s one of those things that you hear about, but never think it would happen to you,” Belk said in a Facebook post, highlighted by Crooks and Liars. Belk continues in the post:

WHEN YOU “FIT THE DESCRIPTION”!

On Friday afternoon, August 22nd around 5:20pm, while innocently walking by myself from a restaurant on Wilshire Blvd, to my car up LaCienega Blvd my freedom was taken from me by the Beverly Hills Police Department.

Within seconds, I was detained and told to sit on the curb of the very busy street, during rush hour traffic.

Within minutes, I was surrounded by 6 police cars, handcuffed very tightly, fully searched for weapons, and placed back on the curb.

Within an hour, I was transported to the Beverly Hills Police Headquarters, photographed, finger printed and put under a $100,000 bail and accused of armed bank robbery and accessory to robbery of a Citibank.

Within an evening, I was wrongly arrested, locked up, denied a phone call, denied explanation of charges against me, denied ever being read my rights, denied being able to speak to my lawyer for a lengthy time, and denied being told that my car had been impounded…..All because I was mis-indentified as the wrong “tall, bald head, black male,” … “fitting the description.”

I get that the Beverly Hills Police Department didn’t know at the time that I was a law abiding citizen of the community and that in my 51 years of existence, had never been handcuffed or arrested for any reason. All they saw, was someone fitting the description. Doesn’t matter if he’s a “Taye Diggs BLACK”, a “LL Cool J BLACK”, or “a Drake BLACK”

Charles Belk

Meanwhile, the Beverly Hills Police Department says they followed proper protocol in its detainment of Belk. The department sent The Huffington Post the following explanation of his arrest:

Beverly Hills Police on Friday arrested 47-year-old Brianna Clemons Kloutse of Los Angeles immediately following an armed robbery at a bank in the 8400 block of Wilshire Boulevard. Police believe that Kloutse is the “Purse Packing Bandit,” responsible for nine recent bank robberies and two attempted bank robberies in Los Angeles, West Hollywood and Beverly Hills. She will be arraigned today at the criminal court building in downtown Los Angeles.

Witnesses to the robbery said Kloutse was most likely working with a man who was distracting the other bank employees while the robbery was carried out. Within minutes of the robbery call being broadcast, police detained a subject less than a block away from the robbery who closely matched the clothing and physical characteristics of the male suspect. After an eye witness positively identified the subject in a field show-up, police arrested Charles Belk for suspicion of robbery. A follow-up investigation by detectives ultimately determined that Mr. Belk was not involved in the robbery and he was released from custody without charges.

The Beverly Hills Police Department deeply regrets the inconvenience to Mr. Belk and has reached out to him to express those regrets and further explain the circumstances. However, based on witness accounts, and his location close to the bank, officers properly detained and arrested him based on the totality of the circumstances known at the time of the field investigation.

The Police Department protocol requires that they go through the process of thoroughly verifying that Mr. Belk was not the suspect before releasing him. That process included taking witness statements, coordination with the FBI and Los Angeles Police detectives who were investigating the earlier bank robberies, and examination of the surveillance video from the bank. Police are still searching for the second suspect.

Think Progress continues:

Belk is a well-connected film and television producer who was en route to an Emmy pre-party later that night. He notes that he “gets” the cops who cuffed him that night didn’t know he was an “award nominated and awarding winning business professional,” that he had been at “one of the finest hotels in their city,” just an hour earlier, and that he was a “well educated American citizen.” “What I don’t get………WHAT I DON”T GET,” he writes. “is, why, during the 45 minutes that they had me on the curb, handcuffed in the sun, before they locked me up and took away my civil rights, that they could not simply review the ATM and bank’s HD video footage to clearly see that the “tall, bald headed, black male”… did not fit MY description.”

Once Belk was eventually permitted to make a phone call, he used his connections to find criminal defense lawyer Jaaye Person-Lynn, who left a wedding to come retrieve him late Friday night. When Person-Lynn got there, Belk was being held on $100,000 bail. Person-Lynn said he was there for an hour before he was able to see Belk. For 40 minutes, officers disputed that Belk had actually requested a lawyer and rejected requests to see him.

Jaaye Person-Lynn

Person-Lynn said he had assumed before he arrived that for police to hold Belk that long, they must have had some sort of additional evidence that he committed the crime than his matching description.

“I gave the cops the benefit of the doubt at that moment,” he said. “But unfortunately it didn’t end up that way.” It’s common knowledge among law enforcement that all cops have surveillance tapes. And they never even checked the tape until after Person-Lynn showed up to represent Belk. Once they watched the tape, it became immediately clear that the actual suspect didn’t look much like Belk and they released him.

It was midnight when Belk was finally released. But Person-Lynn said many other individuals who found themselves in Belk’s situation without his resources would likely have been detained at least until Monday, when a district attorney would have been able to ask him some questions and more defense lawyers were back at work.

Belk also imagined that his arrest could have been worse: he almost ran to his car to check his parking meter, but slowed to a walk when he received a text.

“[I]f it wasn’t for a text message that I was responding to, I would have actually been running up LaCienega Blvd when the first Beverly Hills Police Officer approached me. Running!” he wrote.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, another prominent black man, recounted a story of being stopped by police in another tony neighborhood, Georgetown in Washington, D.C., when he was running to get to a movie in time and police flashed their vehicle lights as they yelled “Where are you going? Hold it!”

“I am the Attorney General of the United States. But I am also a black man,” Holder said last week in a visit to Ferguson, Missouri, where he recalled the stop again. Speaking of several other incidents in which he was pulled over the highway and had his car searched, he said, “I remember how humiliating that was and how angry I was and the impact it had on me.”

In Belk’s case, Person-Lynn didn’t fault the officers for stopping Belk initially, given that he fit the description of what they were looking for. It’s the “overreaction” that followed — and it’s overreaction that he says is epidemic against black men.

“They need to do their due diligence in determining that I either am or am not the person they are looking for,” he said. “It’s worth a few minutes. Stand on the curb while they review the surveillance tape. I don’t think it should have lasted ten minutes. But six hours is ridiculous to take a man’s liberty away when it’s something so clear that he was not involved.” He added, “Whoever really did it got a six-hour lead.”

11 Responses

In the 80’s while living in Los Angeles, this happened to me twice. I was in my 20’s and not as aware of what could have really happened. The first time was in Burbank. I was leaving “My Job” and stopped a a gas station near my bus stop to urinate. The bathroom door crashed open and three policeboys aimed guns at my head. The handcuffed me and held me for 45 minutes until a witness from a robbery stated that I was not the man. He was 6″ 2″ and 290lbs and I was 5’11” and 170lbs. My employer was across the street and confirmed that I just left. I was a undercover security agent at a store at the time.

The second was when a lady was robbed in my apartment building and I chase the robber away. The lady called the police and my wife went with her to her apartment to comfort her. The police knocked on my door with guns drawn. It was about 16 of them in the stairwell with guns aimed on me. The policeboy would not listen to me explain I was the hero not the zero. He touched my genitals and testicles to provoke a reaction in order to shoot. Had I moved on instinct I would be dead. All I obtained was a “Just doing our job”. This was in the 80’s. It happened two additional times while in L.A.

Barack Bush and Eric Thomas do not care about black people. Only the one’s they birthed and married.
They will go down in history as the worst to hold office. Trying to impress whites at the expense of dead black children.

BHPD seemed to have did their jobs all wrong- not checking surveillance video, not reading Belk his rights, not letting him make his phone call right away and refusing Belk’s lawyer from seeing him once he (lawyer) arrived. Damn shame! It’s almost as if were going backwards in time.

Is what happened to Mr. Belk classic Keystone Cops incompetence, or blatant racism? I think it was both.

Detaining Mr. Belk, and then conveniently forgetting to read him his rights when they decided to arrested him is straight crazy. Then denying Mr. Belk his right to contact legal counsel, coupled with not reviewing the surveillance video from the bank and other video from businesses in the neighborhood confirms both incompetence and racism.

The Beverly Hills police know all of the businesses with video surveillance systems, so what gives?

There is a war on black people in America. Everyone knows that, but we have nuts running around pretending the blatant disrespect, harassment, beating and killing of black people is f-cking normal.

I say we keep point out the iniquities, because these egregious acts are happening to us, not them.
The racist white folks are playing the race card on us, and daring us to call them on it.

The church and our “representatives” are silent.

Like Jasmyne Cannick said in an earlier piece today, it’s time for our elected “representatives” to sh-t or get off of the pot.

The Democrats have a lot to say about immigration reform, and gay rights, but when it comes to speaking up for black people who are being harassed, beaten, and killed — nothing but crickets.

We have to form our own coalitions outside of the traditional “meet at the church” template, folks. Those days are over. The pastors are too busy building monuments to themselves, and the Democrats are weak.

They abandon their colleagues when trouble comes. Whereas, the Tea Publicans stand by their people, and dare anyone to demand their resignation.

It’s time for us to organize and elect people who are not going to take the “black vote” for granted.

If Bill and Hillary think they’re getting my vote easily, they have another thing coming. I still haven’t gotten over Bill’s stupid borderline racists comments towards Barack Obama during the first campaign back in 2008.

We have to value our clout folks (and we do have it), and make these people EARN our vote.
It’s time to start thinking different people, and I’m not saying move over to the nuts on the so-called right, either. They really have nothing for us, and never will.

What happened to this brother in Beverly Hills, CA happens to us everyday, all over this country, and worse!

Wow truth is stranger than fiction. Like movie Crash or that one with Morgan Freeman when the police think he’s breaking into his own house. Or was that Samuel Jackson, well you we all look alike ask the entertainment reporter from KTLA and you will know its true!

“The Police Department protocol requires that they go through the process of thoroughly verifying that Mr. Belk was not the suspect before releasing him.” Shouldn’t they go through the process of proving that someone IS the suspect before arresting them?

The “Bubbly Hills” PD knows every establishment that has video surveillance in BH.

They have regular community meetings with the business owners and residents. The businesses register their video security systems with the BH PD.

As the article outlined, the video of the real suspect(s) was available to the cops from the beginning. They just didn’t bother to examine the evidence.

If they would have bothered to examine the video of the suspects. Mr. Belk would have been on his way within an hour. So, let’s stop pretending the cops were doing their best to find the right guy.

They assumed they had the right guy because there are not that many black men walking those hallowed streets, and because of their contempt prior to investigation, the real bad guy got away! So typical….

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